Sonos Unplugged: Leadership, Innovation, and Technology

Jeff Derderian, Vice President of Product Program Leadership at Sonos, discusses the company's origins, the leadership behind its product programs, and the cutting-edge technology that powers their innovative audio equipment.

Learn more about this topic:
How Sonos Partners with Creators to Deliver an Authentic Sound Experience

The Future of Listening: A Conversation with Sonos’ Ryan Moore

How Sonos Crafts the Ultimate Sound Experience

Featured in:
Tomorrow's World Today - Season 6 Episode 6 - Feel The Sound

Transcript

0:00: Welcome to the Tomorrow's World Today podcast. 

 0:04: We sit down with experts, world changing innovators, creators and makers to explore how they're taking action to make tomorrow's world a better place for technology, science, innovation, sustainability, the arts and more. 

 0:21: And now this week's episode on today's episode of the Tomorrow's World Today podcast, George Davison, who is also the host of Tomorrow's World Today on science interviews Jeff Darian, who is the vice president of product program leadership with Sonos, an audio equipment manufacturer headquartered in Santa Barbara, California. 

 0:38: Jeff discusses Sonos beginnings as a company leading the product program leadership team and the innovative technology behind their audio equipment. 

 0:45: Now, here's George. 

 0:46: Well, thank you for coming today. 

 0:47: Thanks George. 

 0:48: Happy to be here. 

 0:49: So can we start a little bit with talking about? 

 0:52: So, yeah, it's interesting if we go back early, two thousands, right and set us back in that time period for a moment. 

 0:59: This is before the iphone. 

 1:00: Before streaming services of today's generation really existed. 

 1:06: And there were four founders that had a passion for music and they, they both emerged. 

 1:11: sorry, all four of them emerged from the kind of dot com era and were looking to do something that they were very excited about. 

 1:18: They all love music. 

 1:19: They all lived in around the Santa Barbara area and they decided to get together and do something that they love. 

 1:25: So the company was founded as a passion project for solving their home audio issues. 

 1:31: Isn't that amazing? 

 1:33: So they're using their observational skills, identified some challenges and it's in an area that they loved. 

 1:39: So let's go chase this down and make it better. 

 1:42: Yeah, let's go chase it down. 

 1:43: They knew what technology could be in these areas, right? 

 1:47: So again, Wi Fi at the time was a lot slower. 

 1:50: So they said, well, we can just create our own proprietary Wi Fi system in order to connect speakers around the home, move audio around the home at the time, it was before we actually integrated speakers into the product. 

 2:02: So this was a bring your own speaker and we'll connect it with an amplifier that's wireless, right? 

 2:08: That's how it started and then over time. 

 2:10: So why don't we just build it all into one system? 

 2:13: And they brought some new people into the company to, well, let's integrate it. 

 2:15: Let's get some people that are experts in speakers and transducers and embedded electronics, put that into one box and then it, it grew from there and some of the benefits that they have, you know, these types of speakers over, let's say the traditional speakers when I was in college, I was spending hours running wires, rigging, all sorts of stuff. 

 2:36: And I had a very limited control pattern right there with a knob. 

 2:40: So technologically, what are we talking about now? 

 2:43: Yeah. 

 2:43: Well, part of what makes the Sonos system so powerful from an audio perspective is we've characterized it completely, right. 

 2:51: When you bring an independent passive speaker and connect that to an amplifier, the amplifier doesn't have knowledge of what that speaker can do. 

 2:58: So in order to make that speaker, you know, sound great, it's gonna pump you know the the audio signal into that passive speaker. 

 3:05: Without all the signal processing, you could do if you had full knowledge and characterization of what that speaker could do. 

 3:11: So with Sonos, we know all that in our life labs, we measure everything about the speaker. 

 3:16: We put it in anechoic chambers, we spin at 360 degrees. 

 3:19: We listen with microphone arrays, we fully characterized each element of that product. 

 3:25: So that in our software, we can unlock every bit of power every bit of frequency, every bit of capability. 

 3:32: So we can deliver the audio as true to what was mixed in the studio for a music track. 

 3:39: For instance, we can deliver the audio as true what might have been mixed from a home theater perspective. 

 3:44: And it can change based on the content that's coming in because a mix for home theater should be different than a mix for music should be different than a mix for, you know, a Adobe rendering versus a stereo rendering. 

 3:56: It'll all adapt automatically and the customer shouldn't have to know anything about this. 

 4:00: It should just happen automatically. 

 4:01: That's part of the magic of having something that's smart and has, you know, a computer, a Wi Fi, you know, card in there. 

 4:09: all the signals processing that we have. 

 4:11: So the fact that we know everything about the speaker elements and everything about the sealed box itself, everything under the hood, we can control all that. 

 4:19: Thank you for the the background and the intel on that. 

 4:22: Let's talk a little further if we could because you have a title that's very unique. 

 4:27: Would you say the title again? 

 4:29: And then what do you do on a daily basis? 

 4:32: It is unique because I I kind of made it up. 

 4:34: So it's, it's, it's, it's one of those situations where, you know, what we do at Sonos is kind of unique. 

 4:41: We do things that everything is a little bit, a little bit different, a little bit, you know, trying to bring teams together in a unique way to deliver products, you know, that, that are interesting and compelling. 

 4:49: So so I lead the product program, leadership team. 

 4:52: So in, in industry, you might think of this as a program management organization A PM O that would be like the, the industry title. 

 5:00: the reason I actually didn't use some of those words is because we always think about leadership as opposed to just management. 

 5:08: You are setting the charge, you are leading a team, you were driving the action within a, a product program versus managing, managing, feels a little more reactive to me. 

 5:17: So that's kind of why I wanted to tweak it a little bit. 

 5:20: So what we've done with this group is brought together the key leaders that are necessary to develop product to launch a new initiative for the company. 

 5:32: And essentially when we develop a new product, use that as an example, here we assemble what's called a program leadership team. 

 5:39: So these are the key leaders that are required to pull from the engineering functions and assemble a team, the operations functions and assemble a team to interact with, you know, marketing and sales and pr right. 

 5:53: So these are those key leaders and three of those leaders are in my organization. 

 5:56: So that's program management. 

 5:58: They oversee the program of which the product is a piece, but it's not the entire piece, right? 

 6:04: Product is important, but without marketing sales, our beta team or customer care team, these are all the things that go alongside product to make the program. 

 6:13: So that's what the program manager is focused on the product creation leader, another made up title. 

 6:18: That's actually how I started at Sonos as a product creation leader, A PC L. 

 6:22: They are more technically focused. 

 6:25: They have a technical background and they're leading the product development team. 

 6:29: We're what's called a matrix organization. 

 6:31: We have a bunch of functions, you know, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering design, user experience, and they have teams, the product creation leader pulls from those functions and assembles a team for this program, right? 

 6:43: We're gonna make this product. 

 6:44: So I need, you know, two electrical engineers, four mechanical engineers, a lead designer, we assembled this team which can be 3040 people. 

 6:52: They can be fairly large teams and they are coordinating with a product manager. 

 6:58: The product manager is responsible for the vision of the product a bit of the road map for a category. 

 7:04: And I like to say that the product manager and the PC L are kind of two sides of the same coin. 

 7:09: One is technically leading the PC L and the other is more industry leading, looking at the customer being the voice of the customer. 

 7:17: In this example, here I want a sound bar that is a little but smaller around this price point. 

 7:23: We think there's a business case for this. 

 7:25: Here's some pain points for our customers that we think we can help overcome PC L product creation leader then works with them, say, got it. 

 7:32: Well, let's do some research. 

 7:34: Let's, you know, get in people's homes, let's understand, you know what those pain points are, start architecting the system and then we go through our product development process and that PC O leads through that product development process. 

 7:46: They have a counter part which is the product realization leader, another made up title because you know, we like to make up all our titles. 

 7:54: The PR L is the PC L's counterpart for operations. 

 7:58: So operations in this example are manufacturing, supply chain logistics, managing our our bill of materials and costs. 

 8:08: They coordinate very closely with the PC L. 

 8:10: Now to take what is architected can be produced on a small scale to produce it in the millions. 

 8:17: It's very different to produce something as one as as you know, versus having millions come off of a production line at the appropriate yields. 

 8:25: In order to hit the margins, you need to sell a product in industry. 

 8:29: So those are three of the teams that are within my organization. 

 8:32: We have another team that I really I really value highly, which is we call operational excellence. 

 8:38: So this is a focus on driving continuous improvement and managing our processes within the product organization. 

 8:46: So whenever you're developing product, you have processes you follow. 

 8:50: But I like to say that the process should serve the product and the or the program and not the other way around. 

 8:55: So in order for that to be true, you have to continuously evolve and learn best practices. 

 9:01: OK? 

 9:01: What worked on this program? 

 9:03: How do we learn? 

 9:03: Make sure the next program can benefit for those learnings. 

 9:07: It's fine to make mistakes, but you shouldn't be making them over the same mistakes, over and over again, learn from them evolve, adjust the process. 

 9:15: So we have a team that's focused on that and focused on training. 

 9:18: That's another another area of the group. 

 9:19: And the, the last area that we have is called hardware integrated system solutions. 

 9:23: Another made up title here, but it really focuses on two elements for the product team, one managing the systems and tools that the organization relies on in order to develop product C ad tools, bond management tools, things like that and then managing the data that flows in from our manufacturing organizations in order to understand. 

 9:45: OK. 

 9:45: How many parts do we have, have we ordered enough? 

 9:48: You know, what is the supply chain look like in doing analytics? 

 9:50: So that's a bit of the organization. 

 9:52: I wanna thank you for that because it's nice to know that the Sonos product and brand stands for more than just a speaker in a box. 

 10:00: There's a lot of technology here. 

 10:02: Now going into your background a little bit, I think people were gonna be a little curious as to how you got here, right? 

 10:10: You didn't just wake up yesterday morning and you became who you are. 

 10:15: Could you share a little bit of background with us, your educational background? 

 10:20: Was there an aha moment in your life where you were like this is what I wanna do, you know. 

 10:25: Can you share that with us? 

 10:26: Yeah, absolutely. 

 10:27: So, so thinking back, it was almost kind of predestined that I would go down an engineering path. 

 10:33: So my father growing up is he's an electrical engineer and he's deep on the analog side of electrical engineering. 

 10:40: So, taking basically everything that's in the world, converting it to an electrical signal and then he stops. 

 10:45: Right. 

 10:45: That's what he likes to say. 

 10:46: I stopped right at that boundary of converting it from real world to electrical and then someone else takes over. 

 10:52: So he had me tracing circuits, you know, digging through the box of electrical components to build little circuits. 

 10:58: When I was, you know, very young, I always knew that that was exciting and I was interested in that through high school, I actually got really excited about physics. 

 11:07: So physics and got really into that as well. 

 11:09: So I went to school as a physics major to start, but very quickly realized I wanted to be a little more hands on and I want to, I want to get in a little bit more to the product design side of things. 

 11:21: So I switched to an electrical engineering major. 

 11:24: I went to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and had a great experience there and met some wonderful professors, some of which I'm still in touch with today. 

 11:34: And I realized one of my favorite courses actually through that through those, those years of my undergrad was one of the courses where you were designing your own circuit boards. 

 11:45: And I remember just being in the lab for hours, hours late at night, just designing this because it felt like art to me. 

 11:52: And I felt like this fusion of OK, there's this puzzle I have to figure out. 

 11:56: And that really stood out to me because I realized as I went on that it was that aspect that I got the most excited about solving a problem. 

 12:05: Right. 

 12:05: Here's something I need to achieve. 

 12:07: I can solve it. 

 12:08: You know, I just have to read a variety of different what's called data sheets about various components. 

 12:13: Figure out how they all connect together, use, use the knowledge I've gained over the years of education to figure out. 

 12:18: OK, this is how they should work, test it, build it, assemble it together. 

 12:23: So I something here in the later years of my undergrad, I started interning in the radio astronomy lab. 

 12:31: So in my kind of junior and senior year, I started designing some of these circuits a little bit more. 

 12:37: And it was a really great experience because this lab was small. 

 12:41: There's 34 of us, each person had to manage their own library of parts within the C AD system. 

 12:49: They had to design their own circuits, design their own boards, have them fabricated, assemble them themselves, test them themselves, right? 

 12:57: Every step of in a small shop, right? 

 12:59: Small smaller scale, but you have to do every step of the process. 

 13:03: So getting that experience to learn every step of the process was the perfect kind of seed for what then became, you know, my career, right. 

 13:12: So I ended up working there for about a year after school and then, decided to move back to the east coast of Massachusetts. 

 13:22: So, and, and got a job at a place called Draper Laboratory, which was a not for profit government kind of R and D lab and got a whole variety of experience there as well. 

 13:32: It sounds like your father was a mentor in a way helping you to get in, you know, interested into the world of circuits. 

 13:39: Did you have any other mentors? 

 13:42: You mentioned a teacher in college too. 

 13:44: Did you have any that you can recall? 

 13:47: That kinda got you on to a course that helped you stay on a good path? 

 13:54: Yeah, a couple, couple of people come to mind there. 

 13:56: I mean, going back again to high school for a minute here. 

 13:59: I, so, so the other, the other passion that I had that I was really excited about was the music, right? 

 14:06: So, no surprise that I ended up at a company that, that is that is bringing music to people's, you know, homes and lives, but, you know, sang, played, guitar, played in bands, recorded, you know, recorded our band and a couple other bands in town. 

 14:22: So I had a music teacher that was actually very inspirational to me from a totally different, like an orthogonal, you know, angle to the engineering side and was encouraging me to get out of my comfort zone and encouraged me to take a solo, you know, to, to sing, you know, a little bit more, it's very shy as a kid. 

 14:40: So I'd say from, from that angle and this is like, mentorship can come in all varieties. 

 14:44: And that type of inspiration I got from Mr Lowe Barry Low. 

 14:50: really sticks with me today when it comes to like when I think about performance, right? 

 14:55: And you think about, you know, part of the job is speaking to people and communicating in a way that you don't have to feel nervous or shy. 

 15:02: But you think about, well, I've put on shows before high school shows, but, you know, you get that feeling and a little bit of that rush of excitement when you go to put on a performance like that. 

 15:11: So I think about Barry Barry Low. 

 15:13: from that perspective in college, I did have a, a great teacher, Baird Souls, which was, you know, that was that teacher that really unlocked a bit of my senior design project and building something, creating a product for the first time. 

 15:29: And some of these courses that allowed me to see what hands on product development can look like. 

 15:35: So that was another person that I think about and I stay in, stay in contact with, with him as well. 

 15:39: So a couple, couple folks along the way, some great, great folks when I was at Draper that I learned from and got to see a variety of different industries, right? 

 15:49: Not, not for profit, government R and D, you do a whole bunch of different work. 

 15:53: You know, I worked on NASA programs, I worked on dod programs, all sorts of things and you learn a lot from, I'd say a variety of people in, in that type of realm. 

 16:02: I think the key takeaway for me is like keep on talking to people and learn from, from whoever you can learn from. 

 16:09: Like today, I'm still learning from people all the time. 

 16:12: Yeah, we talked a little earlier about your, the teams that are involved in the organization. 

 16:20: A lot of our stem work that we do with the schools is team oriented. 

 16:25: And because we understand the value of that when you work in an organization and you're interacting with other human beings, right? 

 16:33: So in a company or on a team, people often have many ideas for ways to improve something or solve a problem. 

 16:41: How do you or how to Sonus select and prioritize which ideas to pursue and which ones to leave on the back burner? 

 16:50: That is probably the hardest part is, is and especially of what, what I do personally, the hardest part of figuring out what do we put forward and when have we learned enough about an idea to say whether to propel it forward or not? 

 17:07: You know, in a company, you have a finite pool of resources and you have to invest those resources in a way that's gonna maximize both output from a, you know, financial perspective, but also output from an experiential perspective for our customers. 

 17:21: How do we give our customers the best products possible while also creating a sustainable business? 

 17:26: And you got to balance both of these things and sometimes the scale goes this way, sometimes it goes that way. 

 17:31: Yes, yes. 

 17:32: But deciding what and when is also important, right? 

 17:36: We think about this concept that we talk about, which is called right, the right product and the right product balances all of these tensions that exist, right? 

 17:44: There might be a financial tension to say, well, we have to reduce cost here, but we need quality, right? 

 17:50: We have engineering tensions. 

 17:52: The acoustics team wants a big, you know, box, you know, to have enough acoustic volume to push all the power the design team wants smooth, smooth edges that are smaller, right? 

 18:04: And look look great and you need both, right? 

 18:07: Have an amazing sounding speaker that doesn't look good, no one's gonna put it in their house, right? 

 18:13: So these tensions exist in every facet of the product development process. 

 18:18: So what you want to learn as early as possible is whether you have a compelling product and that compelling product is gonna compete against other ideas that you have. 

 18:29: So timing is important, you know, is there something that's time critical where if we don't launch this product in this window, we missed a moment. 

 18:36: We've missed the market. 

 18:37: That's important. 

 18:38: There's how does it round out your portfolio? 

 18:41: You know, right now we have three sound bars in our line. 

 18:44: It wasn't always like that. 

 18:45: We started with one. 

 18:47: What's the right product to make? 

 18:48: Do we start what's called up market at the highest price point or is our down market at the lowest price point? 

 18:53: How do you decide on that? 

 18:55: And so all of these go into how you strategize and figure out a plan to execute, you know, against a portfolio against a company. 

 19:04: We do a lot of research, right? 

 19:05: So we put products in people's homes, we listen to our customers, we see what their pain points are and Sonos is a global company. 

 19:14: So we have to do that in a variety of regions around the world because the pain points for somebody living in London are gonna be different than someone living living in Tokyo, different than someone living in L A or, or in Pittsburgh, right? 

 19:27: It's all gonna be different pain points. 

 19:29: And how do you make one product that can serve all of those needs. 

 19:33: You have to talk to people, you have to talk to your customers, you have to do research. 

 19:37: We pull all that in, in what's called kind of early exploration phases. 

 19:42: And then we go through our product development process where we take those ideas and we say, OK, based on all these ideas and then mapping that against timing against business needs. 

 19:52: We think that these are the, you know, we take this 100 ideas, whittle it down. 

 19:55: There's a dozen things we think are, are interesting. 

 19:58: We're gonna space these over time, finite resources. 

 20:00: We're gonna take these six forward. 

 20:02: Now, these six, we're gonna put into our product development process now and we start with what's called incubation. 

 20:07: You know, we develop it just enough, right? 

 20:10: You don't want to develop it so much that you've wasted resources on it, but you want to incubate it just enough to know if that idea can be something that we want to actually invest in, right? 

 20:21: So a little bit more research, you build a plan around it. 

 20:25: You understand how much investment you believe it'll take. 

 20:28: Do we have the technology to do this right now? 

 20:31: Do we have to go invent something before we're ready for this? 

 20:34: We do that work up front and incubation fail all the time all the time. 

 20:39: If we only put forward the things that are gonna, that are gonna be winners, then we never know how far, we can push the boundaries of something and they fail. 

 20:47: And sometimes they say, well, this was too broad of a con, we're gonna, we're gonna narrow it down a little bit. 

 20:52: That's one way which we revise things. 

 20:54: We can say this idea. 

 20:55: Maybe it's a great idea, but we think the market may be too small for what we can do right now. 

 21:00: So we'll put that on the back burner, right? 

 21:02: So I said, blend with all these things. 

 21:04: We our customers love it. 

 21:06: Is it possible for us to develop it? 

 21:08: And then will the market, you know, respond in a way that it's gonna be financially viable for us? 

 21:13: We balance all those tensions and if it all maps together, we then put it forward into the next phase. 

 21:18: So you kind of touched on this, how important is research in your job and your business? 

 21:23: Sure critical, I'll say it is critical to, to the job, to the to the company, right? 

 21:28: We have to learn from a product development perspective. 

 21:32: We have to talk to our customers, right? 

 21:34: We we, we say at Sonos like we are not the customer. 

 21:37: Yes, we, we love music. 

 21:39: Everyone is so passionate about music. 

 21:41: We have obviously speakers upon speakers in our homes, but we're not the customer because we're too close to it. 

 21:47: We can't be unbiased when it comes to the pain points that exist with people that are not like technical experts and know, you know, the ins and outs of speaker technology. 

 21:59: So we talk to them, we put products in people's homes that are unreleased, hear from them, revise the software even early on in that incubation phase will put early concepts if it's something new for us in people's homes. 

 22:12: I was when I was a PC L with product creation leader early on at Sonos, we were developing what is now the move Sonos Move, which is our first battery powered product. 

 22:24: But at the time we did, we didn't have anything that was battery powered, right? 

 22:28: So how, how do we know what's the right size? 

 22:30: What's the right sound? 

 22:33: Are people gonna charge it at night or do we need to have some way to have it be charged? 

 22:38: Right. 

 22:38: So we took, we had the play one which is our smallest product and we put that with a battery and we 3D printed a housing around it and kind of painted it black. 

 22:49: So it looked ok. 

 22:50: And we put that in people's homes. 

 22:52: So we put one in L A, we put one in Chicago, we put one in London and we had people live with it for a week and they had to log, you know, some, you know, journal, right? 

 23:01: Some diaries about the experience and then we went and did home visits to each of those sites. 

 23:06: So I went to all those locations with our user research team and our product management team and our user experience team. 

 23:12: And we saw how they enjoyed the product. 

 23:14: And there was one moment that was really pivotal for me about how we actually changed part of the direction for the product. 

 23:21: And it was in Chicago. 

 23:23: And they said, well, it's always running out of batteries. 

 23:25: Like this is the only problem with it. 

 23:26: It's always running out of batteries. 

 23:28: And then my, it's like, well, if you charge it every night, it should be like we put a big battery, put more than enough in this, in this prototype. 

 23:35: It will show me, well, it's charging right now. 

 23:37: Oh, cool. 

 23:38: Show me where you have a charging and they brought me over and I looked, and it was sitting on the table and the charging cable was sitting right next to it unplugged. 

 23:46: I said, oh, I forgot to plug it in. 

 23:48: Right. 

 23:48: So how many people at night? 

 23:50: You, you have your phone? 

 23:51: You forget the cables right there. 

 23:53: Just that last little was too much. 

 23:55: So, got it. 

 23:56: We're gonna put in a charging station in the box. 

 23:59: So that was it because this product now can be a room of music. 

 24:02: So you have it on this loop dock, charging station, it charges all the time. 

 24:06: Any time you pick it up, it's charged and ready to go. 

 24:08: And then also when it's in the home, it fills that room with music. 

 24:11: So it was a way to click, got it. 

 24:13: We need to put that in the box observational research, right? 

 24:17: And asking questions to people, not on the project. 

 24:22: So you're getting raw data, right? 

 24:24: And then having the desire to want to make a better product for everybody. 

 24:30: So that gives you opportunities for that aha moment to discover what the next thing is that you need to do. 

 24:38: That's right. 

 24:39: And so research is really important and understanding the commitment to it I think is,, is what leads you into a path of discovery. 

 24:48: Totally. 

 24:48: That whole product started because we thought people wanted an outdoor speaker, right? 

 24:53: But when most people think about outdoor speakers for the home, they think about it's attached to the house, right? 

 24:59: It's amounted to the side of the house so you can listen when you're outside. 

 25:03: But the research said that's not what people want they wanted. 

 25:06: Sometimes it was the backyard. 

 25:07: Some times it was when they were raking leaves in the front, sometimes when you're shoveling snow, sometimes when you're playing, you know, hockey in the street. 

 25:14: So they actually wanted something, they can move around the outside spaces of the home. 

 25:18: So that totally shifted the, the concept altogether. 

 25:21: That early research. 

 25:22: That's wonderful. 

 25:23: So we now know research goes hand in hand at Sonos and by the way, it does an invention land as well and most other companies that I know of good stuff. 

 25:34: All right, how important is marketing to your business in what ways do you or Sonos? 

 25:39: Tell others about your goods and services also essential, right? 

 25:44: Making an amazing product that nobody knows about is not gonna do much. 

 25:49: The business is not gonna last long and all the creativity that I've been describing on the kind of product development side of things exists in spades, on the, on the marketing and pr side of things as well. 

 26:02: I'm always, and I tell my team because not everyone participates in like big press events and talking to, you know, reporters, talking to folks like yourself. 

 26:12: But what I always bring back to the team as I said, that every bit of energy and creativity that went into making this product is carried forward in the marketing and in the press releases in the, in the events that will hold to bring people in to learn about the product, you have to care at every level in order to make it. 

 26:30: Yeah, it's like the the entire ecosystem from identifying the channel challenges coming up with the ideas, figuring out a way to get manufactured and then figuring out a way to hit a price point that consumer can afford and benefit from. 

 26:44: And then can you get them excited? 

 26:47: That's what you're what you've created. 

 26:49: That's right. 

 26:49: And in every region, you know, talking to again, the region in Tokyo region in London region in L a, it's all different, there's different, you know, societal norms, there's different environments, there's people that are, you know, hearing about, you know, products in a different way. 

 27:06: So you have to adjust that narrative a little bit. 

 27:09: Right. 

 27:09: We still, you know, still the core fundamentals of the product, but how you introduce it in a market makes all a world of difference. 

 27:16: Right. 

 27:16: Right. 

 27:16: Yep. 

 27:17: So, let's see here in any business there are often many jobs being done all at the same time to reach a common goal. 

 27:25: How do you or Sonos manage multiple operations and keep people working toward the same objective? 

 27:32: That is basically what my team does. 

 27:34: So that's a, that's an excellent question. 

 27:36: So, yes, you know, and as we've grown over the years, we've shifted from focusing on, like we're all working on this one product as a company to working on many, many, many different things simultaneously. 

 27:48: How do you scale that up? 

 27:50: Right. 

 27:50: So, so one, you need to have good processes that you rely on, right. 

 27:55: You, you, you lean on what you've learned in the past, you've revised those over time. 

 28:00: So you're always bringing your best practices forward. 

 28:03: So again, any engineer doesn't have to repeat the same mistake someone else has. 

 28:08: That's one piece that is what allows us to have consistency across the various endeavors, independent of who's leading them and who might be on, on the team. 

 28:17: Of course, we have wonderful engineers and wonderful, you know, program leaders, but still everyone has to bring their own style and their own experience. 

 28:27: How do you bring consistency? 

 28:28: You lean on those best practices and you learn from each other. 

 28:31: That's kind of one way. 

 28:32: the other piece is having a plan, right? 

 28:35: What's the project plan? 

 28:36: What's the dates and that we're gonna drive to, to bring everyone back together, right? 

 28:41: So often in product development, you think of like the kind of the funnel widens as you're all learning about an idea and a concept and it starts to narrow as you're focusing back in and you have an aligning point, you converge, OK? 

 28:54: We've all learned a bunch. 

 28:56: We're gonna converge now and decide on the direction for this product. 

 29:00: OK? 

 29:00: We've decided it's gonna be this form, this acoustic architecture, this industrial design, this, you know, material and finish and we're gonna have, you know, this, whatever it is, right? 

 29:11: You converge, but then it widens a bit more as you're now going deep on that one concept. 

 29:16: You're gonna learn a lot more, you go a little bit wider as you then discover a little bit more about that concept and then you have to converge again, right? 

 29:22: And you bring it back together. 

 29:23: OK? 

 29:23: We've learned now enough. 

 29:25: We've designed it all in C AD, we've mocked it all up. 

 29:28: We've done some prototypes, you know, not full in form, but we've made, this prototype represents the acoustics. 

 29:34: This represents the thermal system. 

 29:36: This represents the mechanic system. 

 29:39: We've designed it in C AD we've done some design models so we know what it'll look like, but it's empty inside. 

 29:46: Right. 

 29:46: We've learned a lot. 

 29:47: We believe that. 

 29:48: Yes, we want to go forward and prototype fully systems now because at every step of the way, it's a bigger and bigger investment, it gets harder and harder to change course as you've made those bigger and bigger investments. 

 30:00: So you converge again and then you start prototyping and then when you start making something at scale all the other issues, right? 

 30:06: It comes back. 

 30:07: We got all these problems now and bugs and issues, how do we overcome? 

 30:10: And then you drive towards the next piece. 

 30:12: So what I like to say is you drive a team from these various points of convergence and you sprint as hard as you can to those to learn as much as you can. 

 30:22: But you also need a date because I find a program will fill the void of time that you give it. 

 30:29: You give it two more weeks, they'll somehow be down to the wire with two more weeks. 

 30:33: You give it four more weeks, it'll be down to the wire with four weeks. 

 30:36: You gotta call it at some point. 

 30:37: And what good leadership does is knows when it's just enough that you're not burning the team out because it's not just about the end result, but it's about how you get there. 

 30:47: You want, at the end of that, at the end of that product development cycle, you want a team that's gonna wanna do it again with you. 

 30:52: So you drive the team, you know, OK, I think this will take this amount of time. 

 30:56: You listen to your team if they really need more to give a little bit more, but you hold the line as well because it'll fill the void. 

 31:02: Always, always, I really like the way you've described it. 

 31:06: It's you know, the widening and tightening and widening and tightening that visual. 

 31:12: I think I can see that in a, in a graph that helps to explain that process. 

 31:16: So, you know, thanks again, that's, that's good stuff. 

 31:20: All right. 

 31:20: Last question. 

 31:21: Sure. 

 31:22: What's the next big innovation that you're excited about working on? 

 31:26: Sure. 

 31:26: Well, we've been talking a lot recently about spatial audio and then this is a new relatively new immersive format for music that is I'd say like at the early stage of where mass adoption is gonna happen, right? 

 31:39: And this is a recent product release that we, that we put out the era 300 that is like really doing out loud facial audio justice for the first time we believe, right? 

 31:50: What we're excited about with this is like music went from mono to stereo not that long ago. 

 31:55: Really? 

 31:56: Right. 

 31:56: In the scheme of things and we view this and the excitement we're seeing, working with creators, artists in the industry, producers. 

 32:06: because part of our creative process is to have our sound board of advisors which are award winning, you know, producers, music or listen to the products and tell us, does it sound right? 

 32:17: Does it sound good and we tweak it and adjust it and keep working it until it sounds great across all these genres. 

 32:22: But when we get in the studios and talk about this format and, and this is a format that allows creators to do things differently, we get really excited because there's something new here and it allows people to mix audio in a way that allows you to give more space to the instruments, you know, place them in a way so that you don't have to kind of cram everything into just two channels of audio with some equalization that was freedom to kind of move in the room, feel like you're there with the band there at the concert, right? 

 32:54: So this format is really interesting and it's taken a lot of different steps actually, to get to this point, we've been talking about this for 67 years, right? 

 33:04: But part of this process is understanding well, first you need a way to mix in the right format so that engineers in the studio can, can actually create the content, you then need a way to deliver that content to the home. 

 33:18: So, streaming services have to be on board with providing that content to the home. 

 33:23: You then need a product in the home that can render that format. 

 33:28: That's where the speaker comes in, right? 

 33:29: How do you have every step of that along the way? 

 33:31: So 67 years ago, it was, well, it's not quite there yet, but we know what is the same spatial format Dolby atmos for home theater. 

 33:41: Let's start there. 

 33:42: So we started there and that's where we developed the Sonos Arc. 

 33:45: That's our first sound bar that delivers Dolby atmos because in a home theater scenario, a customer really understands what that means. 

 33:53: Well, I'm gonna have, you know, voice in the front and it's gonna pan left to right. 

 33:57: I'm gonna have surround sound things from above me. 

 33:59: It's very intuitive. 

 34:01: So I like to say that the only way that a director can tell a story with film that happens off screen is with sound allowing us to then debut that, learn about that technology with that product was what then led our engineers to then pull that into the era 300. 

 34:19: So we're taking what was a longer format soundbar, condensing different arrangement, diff totally different acoustic architecture. 

 34:25: But we learned first on that product. 

 34:27: So you can start and develop a technology with one product and then actually add, add to it when we decided to develop the E 300. 

 34:37: We said, we think the moment is right for this. 

 34:39: We think that now talking to professionals in the music industry, they said yes, there's starting to be this inflection curve where it's getting more adoption. 

 34:48: We think there'll now be enough of that chain, right? 

 34:50: There'll be enough content streaming services will provide it. 

 34:54: And now we're gonna be at the end of that chain. 

 34:56: So there's a system, there's a system here. 

 34:58: So we're really thrilled about this because we believe this product is at the right moment to really introduce spatial audio in a way that these artists intended to be consumed. 

 35:10: They want people to listen to it out loud music is, is, you know, it's great in headphones. 

 35:16: No, no doubt, but shared experiences where we can listen at the same time in the same environment is, is what music is about. 

 35:25: For me, it's the connectivity that comes well, that's very exciting. 

 35:30: I can't, I can't wait to see more and more of it emerge over time. 

 35:34: So Jeff, thank you for your help today and explaining Sonos and some of your past. 

 35:41: Everybody. 

 35:42: There you go. 

 35:42: That's another edition of tomorrow's world Today. 

 35:45: Thank you, Jeff. 

 35:46: Thank you. 

 35:46: Bye, everybody. 

 35:48: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Tomorrow's World Today podcast. 

 35:53: Join us next time as we continue to explore the worlds of inspiration, creation, innovation and production, discover more at tomorrow's world today dot com and connect with us on social media at T W T explore and find us wherever podcasts are available.